


Razor

by AndreaLyn



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 05:33:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3679815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy's been made sharp as razors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Razor

He cuts himself shaving in the morning.  
  
By noon, the patch is gone and the blood is nothing more than a miniscule dot that barely reminds him of the initial injury, caused by an antique that should be pressed away in a drawer to be kept as they do in museums. Instead, Leonard McCoy uses it as a reminder of the way things used to be and the way that they still are from time to time. Razors are an expensive thing, but McCoy had come by his the honest way. His father inherited it from his father and so it was passed down in the paternal lineage of a family that always had sons.  
  
Until Leonard, that was.   
  
He gave his family a little girl and the razorblade stopped its familial descent with him. He’s lucky that it had already been in his possession the day that his father died – was  _murdered_ , they whispered – because if it hadn’t been, it probably would have been denied to him.   
  
Assassins get their prize, but McCoy’s only trophy is the lifelong sense of shame and guilt that’s going to follow him like a lingering shadow stepping on his heels and pulling off his shoes.   
  
He earned a second razor from Jocelyn Darnell in the process of a long and hard-fought divorce. He had started as any happy married man did – soft around the edges, buoyed with the content of finding the happy-ever-after. Each step closer to the day that they parted ways forever brought a sharpness to him that he hadn’t even seen until it’d been too late.   
  
“You killed your father,” she’d accused with the sobriety of a fact and that night, he doesn’t take his mother’s call because he can’t bear to deal with another soliloquy of sorrow.   
  
“You’re never around for your daughter. That  _hospital_  is your goddamn child,” she’d spat at him and he makes two of his interns cry within the end of a shift. He used to be the man who wore the Santa suit to the children’s ward and sat with the old folks to listen to them talk as they recovered, those whose families were too far to make the journey. By the end of the divorce, all he manages to do is tell patients precisely why their ailment is their own doing.  
  
“You’re a disappointment, Leonard Horatio McCoy,” she’d announced at the divorce hearing. “And I don’t remember why I ever loved you.”  
  
He’d come out of his divorce sharp as razors. Comments cut and then burn with the ensuing acidic retorts bound to follow. That particular morning of a day like every other, he clasps his razor in his hands and stares at his reflection as blood drops from his cheek to splatter on the offensively white counter below, as if a mockery of his desire to do no harm. The Academy is supposed to be a bright new future, but he can’t see it for the light glinting off his razorblade in his hands.   
  
He’s not sure which blade is stronger in a battle of wills. The one he clutches or the one he’s become.


End file.
